Games that generate stories

Today my friend Athomas and I were discussing a favorite topic of ours — the fact that traditional games such as Monopoly and chess create a dramatic structure that is like a linear narrative (but is not a linear narrative) through their well constructed rules of game play. The natural progression from early play to mid-game to final battle comes entirely out of the well-crafted “physics” of the game, not through post-facto act of imposed coercion and narrowing of player choices (as in some computer games).

I raised the question of whether one could target a specific well-understood genre of narrative, such as the hero’s journey, or the romantic comedy (genres that have a very clear and definitive structure, well understood by authors and intuitively recognized by audiences), and create a game that invokes in its players an equivalent emotional arc and meta-narrative.

It would be particularly cool if this could be done without computers — simply through such relatively traditional means as moving pieces on a physical board, rolling dice and the choosing of chance cards.

More to follow.

One thought on “Games that generate stories”

  1. Huh. Through all the hours I spent playing marathon Monopoly games as a kid, it never occurred to me to think of the game in terms of dramatic structure, but I think I see what you mean. I’m looking forward to hearing more of what you’re thinking about this in future posts.

    Do you think it is relevant that Monopoly and Chess and similar games do not have well-defined characters? So many of today’s computer games (that are not just puzzles) seem to have characters.

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